#for Claudia's sake

[fuzziiwuzzii]

"Now I know what two blood fat cocks slapping hands feel like, so thank you for that."

[pirateshelly]

As much as nearly every character she meets tends to act like there's something uniquely broken and wrong with Claudia, at no point does it truly seem to me like there actually really is? I mean, obviously she is extremely fucked up, she straight up went through a serial killer collecting trophies phase, but there's a level of fucked up that's sort of the baseline for every character in the show, and obviously being turned into a vampire as a child puts her at a unique disadvantage. But for all that everyone around her spends their time bemoaning how dreadful and doomed her life is, even Louis who genuinely loves her but also builds so much of his identity around feeling responsible for her Terrible Fate™, I really don't think she's like, fundamentally damaged any more than any of the other vampires are.

But Lestat is so unwilling to be wrong that every time her life hits an inevitable road bump instead of helping her through it he points and says "look! see! she IS a monster, I was right Louis, making her was a mistake!" (and I think he sees his own monstrousness in her but fails to also see her humanity)

And then Armand meets her and sees only someone who will inevitably lose her mind, so of course speeding up the "inevitable" and siding with the coven to plan her death is just a mercy, absolving himself of any blame. (and he projects his own frailty and desire for death onto her, failing to see her strength and her desire for life)

Which makes it so cathartic when she meets Madeleine, admits to her how broken she feels sometimes, and Madeleine's response is just. Well that's normal. Who isn't a little broken these days. Let yourself feel it, move on, let yourself feel it again if you need to. After spending her life having others act as if her emotions are something uniquely dark and worrying, Madeleine's incredibly blase attitude must have been such an incredible breath of fresh air for Claudia!

To spend her whole life being made to feel like something is Wrong™ with her, and then meet someone who's just like, "yeah, and?? Who isn't? Join the club I guess"

Which makes her death so incredibly tragic and frustrating because like. She was fine! She was making a life for herself! She wasn't doomed by her nature, she wasn't "doomed by the narrative" (whatever the fuck that even means), she was doomed for no reason other than that everyone around her (except for Madeleine) preemptively DECIDED she was doomed and never gave her a chance to prove them wrong.

[detectiphoenix]

WEEK 3 - LEGO

Not pictured: Terry building a massive Lego warship in the background

[inkpotsprite]

Dead Boy Detectives and Interview with the Vampire are the best shows of 2024, in this essay I will–

[comicake]

Is this..is this all that I can have until his evil of my evil monologue right 🥲

[nashvillethotchicken]

A subtle way you can tell lestat is very selfish and ignorant about race, especially in ep 6 is that he said that they'd go to Argentina, a country which at the time was explicitly looking for white Europeans (including n*zis) to move there after spending decades pushing their black and Indigenous populations to the fringes of society to whiten up the country

[puntointerrogativo]

Still chewing glass over Armand because the vulnerability is real but so is the psychological torture of Claudia…that’s not actually helping with the coven power plays like. At all.

Zero obvious benefit except making her spiral. You could say he’s grasping at straws, victim of his own coven’s surveillance and trying to hold it all together badly but. The strikes are surgical even as it gets conveniently blamed on the coven and on the coven’s restlessness because of Louis independence.

[helloitshaley]

I'm talking any iteration of the character! Tomorrow will be two new ones then the winner from each day will battle and so on until I get the hint that people are uninterested lmao. Also rb and tell me who you want to see next!

[sage-nebula]

One thing I really hope we get to see in S5 is Claudia (and Viren, but especially Claudia) learning that Callum can do primal magic without a primal stone.

While it's possible she learned off-screen and just doesn't care, I hope that's not the case because it just doesn't feel realistic to me. In S2, Claudia justifies her use of dark magic to Callum by saying that "[humans] were born with nothing." She felt, understandably so, that humans couldn't do primal magic on their own, and that dark magic was the only available option to them. (And we see Claudia use the primal stone when she has it, so I think that, back then, she would have connected to an arcanum if she thought it possible.)

But now we (the audience) know that's not the case—that humans CAN connect to arcanums if they're willing to put in the work. And I want to see Claudia reckon with this, because I think it's going to be an emotional tornado for her, for several reasons:

The justification for dark magic she has relied on for years has just gone out the window; humans CAN do primal magic, even without primal stones, meaning that dark magic ISN'T the only option

If it wasn't the only option, does that mean it WAS wrong for her to do the things she's done? From killing fairies to make pancakes to killing at least one human soldier to revive her father?

But it's too late to think about any of this now, because she can't undo it, and just because one human can use primal magic doesn't mean they all can, and dark magic is far more versatile and powerful anyway, and Xadia is still wrong for never telling humans this was possible (nevermind that Aaravos could have told her but didn't—)

Basically, I see Claudia being shocked, confused, guilt-stricken, hurt, and ultimately digging her heels in because holding onto a sunk cost fallacy and blaming others is easier than admitting you could have made other choices. And I want to see Claudia go through this, because we can already see her shutting her eyes against her atrocities in things like her recent Reflections story; I think it'll be interesting to see her go all the way with it.

[raayllum]

Snake Boi Callum Week: Day Two - Power / Politics

[wisteriasymphony]

probably won't ever write it but if i ever did a werewolf!claudia AU it would be the kind where adrien finds the biggest mangiest dog on the side of the road (one that looks like a bear at first glance) and decides to take it home to stay with him and his cat and after like three months of getting the dog vaccinated and living with it in his home it turns out she's secretly also a sapient human being who just prefers living as a wolf because she can be nonverbal and never deal with taxes. and then it's 47 million panels of adrien yelling at a dog the size of a small horse to get a fucking job

[c0pyofa]

okay rewatching s2e3 of iwtv while reading the vampire lestat and............. if they dont give us gabrielle in s3 im afraid i may have to commit some crimes.

[kradogsrats]

Since we already saw past!viren when he resolves his dark magic nightmare in book 5, do you think Soren’s blonde hair could be from a skipped generation from one of his parents’ ancestry

LMAO GOD okay so I'm personally a blond Viren truther and I will die on that hill, so you have opened a real can of worms

A lot of people seem to cite Soren's hair as the reason Lissa "must" be blond, but hair color is determined by a huge amount of very complex genetic factors. Like literally hundreds of genes. It's genetically possible for two people to have a child with pretty much any hair color, regardless of the parents' coloration.

Additionally, what actually creates the color of hair that we perceive is the ratio of two different types of melanin, one that affects the "darkness" of the color, and one that affects the "warmth" (redness, basically). Blond hair can have any ratio of these melanins in very low amounts, because what creates blond hair is just lack of melanin. From there, you also have the fact that melanin production overall tends to increase with age, at least up to maturity—babies' eye color frequently appears to "change" because they start producing more melanin, for example. Blond, particularly very light platinum or golden blond, is considered a "youthful" or desirably rare color on adults (at least in the US/European-influenced West), because it's less common than it is in children. Many kids that start out blond have significantly darker hair by the time they're 18-20, whether it's just a much darker blond or a color that would be characterized as brown, instead. As a kid with hair so blond it was practically white when I was very young, my hair was about the shade known extremely attractively as "dirty" or "dishwater" blond when I hit my 20s, and by the time I was in my 30s... yeah, it's brown. (Meanwhile Spouse is still blond, and in fact is the lone blond from an otherwise brown-haired family.)

Past Viren looks to me to be around?? 20???? or so????? but it's a cartoon so who knows, really. You could probably crank that up 5-8 years or down maybe two. Either way, "Viren was blond into his early teens" is a reasonable stance to take. It's definitely also possible that one or both of his parents was blond. (I imagine his mother as blond, personally.)

Also like... idk man, but Claudia and Viren just have almost nothing in common features-wise besides "not blond," while Soren has an extremely similar facial structure to Viren's throughout. I just think it makes more sense that Claudia is practically a copy of Lissa and Soren takes after Viren.

but hurrrr fantasy nordic people are always blond and del bar is literally just skyrim logic i guess

[butcharyastark]

man i dont know if i like where this is going but god it hurts on concept alone

[mycenaae]

claudia being 'saved' from a fire by louis. i just need her not to die, please. claudia about to be killed by sunlight-induced fire by the coven. louis walking into the sun after hallucinating her. i need this one to live as a testament to our companionship. [screaming]

[memes-saved-me]

I'm actually near tears no one talk to me wtf